


Thomas the Rhymer

by TheGoodDoctor



Category: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Genre: Light Angst, Multi, Pre-Relationship, Victorian Farm, hand-holding treated very seriously, the concept of the Fae treated almost seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-08-25 12:35:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16661263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheGoodDoctor/pseuds/TheGoodDoctor
Summary: “But you brought me tea a few times, so you’ve won my allegiance forever," Ruth says.“What a boon indeed,” Peter yawns sleepily, “to win the protection of a fae lady in exchange for two mugs of tea.”





	Thomas the Rhymer

**Author's Note:**

> gratitude continues to endlessly flow to n3ongold3n for support and interest and being lovely.

Ruth steps carefully over the puddled moonlight covering the farmyard, one hand bunched in her skirts to keep them just clear of the brackish water. They’ve not just had bad weather of late, they’ve also had far too much of it; the fingers not entwined in thick cotton tingle with cold and she spares an almost apologetic glance for the half-finished, wool-walled pigsties. She’s spent enough evenings chiding Peter over chilblains as he ignores her warnings and puts his hands near enough to be almost touching the hot stove to know how much fun that job is in a fine English November.

It’s not precipitating right now, though, just so cold and clear that the air is sharp in her lungs like cut glass. Ruth keeps her eyes down on her smart new-old boots, reaching from one island to another, a grin sneaking onto her face. She suddenly feels ten years old, all over again; jumping and balancing on branches bridging streams and ditches, escaping her parents to play in the woods, reading under the covers with a torch and feigning sleep when telltale footsteps came investigating with hard spines pressing into her ribs. It’s _brilliant._

Hop, hop, step-step- _streeeetch_ together, and Ruth’s teetering on her tiptoes on the very lip of a large, deep puddle, arms outstretched in an effort to avoid tumbling backwards into the doubtless absolutely _freezing_ water. She wobbles a little, and then tips forward, stumbling away and suddenly laughing at the sheer joy of doing something slightly rebellious, slightly childish and more than slightly daft. The sound rings out in the absolute silence of the farmyard and Ruth’s hands fly up to cover her mouth, trying to stifle a sound already made. She’s been too long in cities, where it’s never really quiet, and forgotten how truly still the countryside at night can be. Also, she’s supposed to be sneaking out. Either she was better at this when she was a kid, or her parents were always aware of what she was up to and were really just indulging her.

She can’t resist peering in on the cows. It’s wonderfully warm in there and the big beasts snuffle and snort sleepily at the intrusion, hot breath hanging white on the air. She murmurs a little greeting so that they know it’s her and runs her cold fingers down one soft flank. It twitches under her touch and the cow turns its heavy head to give her a baleful glare through the moonlit gloom. Ruth grins, takes the hint, and shuts them back up to sleep.

Somehow she’s always surprised how much she likes the animals. It’s not really her domain, Victorian about it as they’re being, and she knows absolutely nothing about how to look after any of them, except that from food they are and, ultimately, unto food they shall return. But, somehow, Ruth’s still fond of them all. She likes the proud, stupid chickens, who cluck and chide at her ankles and are extremely suspicious of her swirling skirts, and the opinionated cows, and she’s ready to adore the pigs when they arrive. Ruth even likes the sheep, though they’re possibly the daftest creatures on God’s green earth - that one’s on Alex and Peter, actually. Even if she hadn’t discovered the appeals of animal husbandry on her own, the boys’ sheer enthusiasm for everything they can get their grubby little hands on is rather contagious. Alex’s face lights up with his plans for lambing come spring and shearing come summer, and Ruth can forgive the sheep for their stupidity and the purpling bruise one of them left on his shin. Peter, once he’s stopped turning his hands in front of the stove and idly musing about frostbite, can talk for hours about why the pigsties are being built the way they are, and what the Book of the Farm says about their size and shape, and how he’s going to manage the pigs - and Ruth listens and asks questions and looks down at her darning when her smile starts getting too bright.

She fishes out the heavy iron key from the pocket hidden in the folds of her skirt and unlocks the farmhouse door, swearing under her breath when it jams and she has to really force it. It’s barely warmer in than out, the stove cold for a few hours now, and Ruth shivers as she wipes her boots clean. They’re good boots - comfortable and smart and far less liable to slip than she’d feared. Much better than her seventeenth century shoes. Ruth retrieves the matches from their spot on the high shelf and drops them into the coal scuttle with some tinder and a poker and heads upstairs. It’ll be far easier to heat just the one bedroom than wait for the heavy iron to warm, when she only really wants to stave off the worst of the night air.

The fire takes better than she had thought it might, and she supposes that this - the cleared chimney - is the silver lining to the long construction period before, finally, she could have her precious stove. It also occurs to her, then, that unless Peter and Alex have a secret love of Victorian stoves this shared enthusiasm thing might go both ways.

Well, that or the boys were just hungry.

Ruth draws her chair up to the fire, now licking happily at the red hot coals, and lights the candle on the mantelpiece. Here, it illuminates her lap well enough to pull out her sewing and set to adding tiny neat stitches to the hole in the fabric. It’s one of Alex’s neckties, though he won’t tell her how he came by such damage - if she had to guess, from his side-stepping non-answers and the torn edges, that sheep may have been involved, and she can’t help but grin at the image of Alex, bent double and nose to nose with an obstinate sheep that’s doing its level best to garrotte the poor lad. At least he’s given her the damn thing to mend, though: Peter likes to attempt mending things himself, and this would be sweet if it didn’t usually end up in her lap in a worst state than it had been before he’d had a go at it. His darning, though, is - well, it’s terrible, but it does hold, and-

There is a noise downstairs.

And not a _this is an old house that creaks sometimes_ noise. This is a _there is someone else in this house_ noise.

Ruth sets her mending on the floor with almost exaggerated, silent care and wraps her fingers around the iron poker as she stands. The handle is warm to the touch, but not as warm as the other end, which glows rosy from the fire. She’s aware, as she creeps across the room and onto the stairs, that this is quite possibly nothing - she could easily have been mistaken, and old houses will creak - and a private farm in the countryside is not exactly an inner city dark alley as far as threat levels go, but. Ruth’s cousins used to like to keep her up with ghost stories and faerie tales about quiet old cottages and little girls who snuck off in the night and never came back and the things that hide in the spaces between the moonlight to strike from reflections in pools. She curses her own imagination, even as she tightens her grip on the hard iron and raises it before her, ward against ghosts and faeries all.

The moonlight streams silver through a door she had left closed, latched, but - she winces - not locked, and paints the table with odd shadows, like it’s an echo of the daytime. It feels like something’s missing from the picture, replaced with something else, like some ghostly Kim’s Game, and if this is some boy scout ghost's idea of a _joke-_

Then Ruth steps down one more step and a lot of things happen at the same time.

First, the wood creaks loudly under her boot, seeming to resonate in the quiet space. Second, two shadowy figures abruptly move, previously invisible to Ruth and now facing her in the darkness. Third, there’s a short, sharp squawk and then quite a long stream of cursing in a voice Ruth recognises as-

“Peter?” she queries, lowering her still-glowing poker.

“Fucking hell, Ruth,” says Peter's voice in the darkness, breathing hard, and one of the shadowy figures bends over. The other one appears to be trembling. “Bloody terrifying, you are. Is that a red-hot poker? Bugger me.”

The trembling turns to shaking as Alex’s giggles become entirely uncontrollable and send him stumbling into the light from the door so that Ruth can see his hands pressed over his mouth and the wide grin escaping at the edges. He doesn’t appear so ghostly, now she’s stopped panicking, but rather bright and silver-shining, and she can’t help smiling at his mirth.

“The woman is armed, Alex!” Peter objects, the tremulous edge in his voice easing into grinning despite himself.

“You’ve been telling me ghost stories the whole walk over,” Alex wheezes. “The first noise you hear - you scream like a girl.”

“Did not!” Peter says, and Ruth laughs. “That was a manly battle cry.”

“I’d have said squawk, myself,” Ruth muses. “Or possibly a yelp.”

“Besides,” Peter says, ignoring her. “The only girl in here is prepared to defend herself with a _red-hot poker_. My manly battle cry was not at all girlish.”

Alex nods, grinning up at Ruth. “I’ll give you that. I amend my statement: you squawked like a chicken.”

Peter sighs, bone-deep. “Fine. Next time we’re attacked by a shadow out of nowhere armed with hot iron, I’ll keep schtum.”

Alex’s grin flashes quicksilver in the moonlight. “Ta.”

“Why _are_ you wielding a poker, Ruth?” Peter says, almost whining. “Frightened the life out of me.”

Ruth shrugs, grinning. She’s still running an adrenaline high, blood singing in her veins with pent-up confidence, and it’s this, combined with Peter’s ghostly frights, that makes her tell the truth. “Thought you were faeries, didn’t I? Though iron does for most things, actually, so I’d have been safe if you were ghosts or witches or whatnot.”

The Peter-shaped shadow nods, approaching the stairs and only once knocking his shin into a chair. Here, the moonlight reaches him, too, just about - all shadowed and stubbled and entirely Byronic, with his hair a tousled mess of tumbledown curls. Ruth resists the urge to reach out and touch, to trace the light on the bridge of his nose and let a soft curl loop around her finger.

She is, fortunately, distracted by Alex’s sputtering before it can get the better of her. “We’re not fairies! Fairly sure we don’t sound like little pretty children.”

Peter shakes his head, tutting in mock disappointment. “Well, Alex, that’s a very Victorian interpretation of the source.”

“You take that back,” Alex says rather churlishly, folding his arms across his chest.

Ruth takes pity. “Faeries as in fae folk, Alex, not Conan Doyle and cardboard cut-outs. You know, the kind that spirit you off for seven years and you end up wasting away, dreaming of the courts.”

“Oh. Well, now the poker makes sense,” Alex says, grinning up at her.

Ruth rolls her eyes. “Alright, alright. Maybe I was telling myself ghost stories up there, too. You boys coming up?” With that, she turns and retreats back to the bedroom. She doesn’t wait for a response, fairly confident that they’ll follow, but it’s pleasing anyway when two pairs of heavy bootfalls follow her up without hesitation.

It’s only been a minute, even though it felt like longer; time concertinaed by fear. The fire, therefore, is still blazing merrily in the grate like it had known all along that there wasn’t anything to fret over, but Ruth pulls her skirts back and crouches by it anyway, driving the poker into the coals and persuading her tense fingers to unpeel from the handle. Sparks jump and waltz up the flue, the coals shifting like some small angry beast disturbed from its comfortable slumber, and the rest of Ruth’s restless energy shifts and waltzes away too.

“So,” she says, standing and brushing coal smuts off her skirt before collecting her mending and settling back in her chair. “What are you two doing out after dark?”

“ _After dark_ is any time from three o’clock, these days,” Alex points out as he drags the laundry chest closer to the fire and sits on it cross-legged, like the fairy he had insisted he wasn’t. The thought makes Ruth stifle a smile. “But, um.”

“Alex - thought he’d lost something,” Peter provides, sounding not at all like he was making it up on the spot, and tucks his hands behind his back. The gesture’s all schoolboy innocence, and that makes Ruth smile, too.

“Yes,” Alex agrees quickly, and Ruth nods, attempting to look serious.

“I see. What was it?” she inquires politely.

“A glove,” Alex says, at the same time as Peter says “A book.” They look at each other for a long minute. “A book about gloves,” Peter amends, and Alex closes his eyes in a silent, resigned prayer for a better partner in crime.

Ruth, trying her damnedest not to laugh, nods in understanding. “Right. How were you going to get in?”

Alex’s eyes open. “What?”

She shrugs, all innocence. “Well, you’re in here because I have the key, and I left the door unlocked. So how _were_ you going to get in?”

There’s a moment of silence. Peter turns from looking thoughtfully at the ceiling to frown at Alex. “Are we stupid?”

Alex ducks his head, grinning. “We’re certainly not good at this.”

Ruth, finally, lets herself laugh. “Daft lads. Besides, why are you making excuses to me? I’m already here.”

Peter grins. “We really aren’t good at this. Next time we’re bringing you with us; you seem much better at it.” He flops to the floor before Ruth can do anything about the warmth coiling in her chest at that. He’s all loose limbs and sprawling and ends up lying in front of the grate with an arm against Alex’s box to rest his fingers lightly against his foot and his cheery face between Ruth’s boots. “What are _you_ up to, then, sneaking out like this?”

Alex assumes a mock-officious, disapproving look. “Running off to see any _boys,_ young lady?”

Ruth shakes her head, fake rueful to hide her amusement. “Only an oversized rug and some kind of laundry elf.”

“Oi!” Alex says, unfolding his legs and wedging his feet under Peter’s side, which shakes with laughter. Ruth can’t help joining in, and it’s not long before Alex is giggling too. “Well, as long you don’t go after me with any iron.”

“After I’ve put so much effort into your mending?” Ruth scoffs.

Alex leans in and Peter reaches up, his fingers flicking at the tail of the necktie like a kitten. “Oh, is that what you’re doing?” Alex says, tilting his head to watch her nimble fingers at work. “Ta, Ruth.”

She shrugs. “I like it. And anyway, it’s a better excuse than a lost glove-book.”

Ruth can see Peter grinning behind her work and Alex duck his head to the side of her, in that endearing way he has of hiding a grin. “It’s fun out here, isn’t it?” Peter says. “Like an adventure.”

Ruth’s eyes slide sideways and she shares her fond amusement with Alex over his boyish enthusiasm. Watching the boys at work, sometimes, it feels like they’ve slid sideways out of time: when Alex puts his hands on his hips and squints at the sheep, and Peter uses the back of his hand to push his hat back with a hobnailed boot propped on an unfinished wall, Ruth could frame the moment between her fingers and put it in a museum. Now, though, Peter doesn’t seem to be so Victorian; he looks and sounds like he’s fallen head over heels out of an Enid Blyton book.

“But Peter,” Alex says with obviously feigned seriousness, “we haven’t the lashings and lashings of ginger beer.”

Peter snorts at the obvious comparison before waving a hand at the problem, letting it rest idly against Alex’s knee. “I’ll have to make some, then.”

Alex splutters and Ruth raises an eyebrow at his alarm. “You don’t,” he says quickly. “It’s probably not even Victorian.”

They both look at Ruth for confirmation or denial, Alex with a peculiar desperation that she can’t quite understand. “No, it is,” she says, confused, “it’s in the Family Save-All, I think.”

Peter beams and Alex groans. “Not again,” he mumbles.

“Don’t worry, Alex,” Peter says, nudging his leg happily. “With the book I’m sure it’ll go much better than last time.”

Alex turns to Ruth in resignation. “He made some, once. Or tried to. Except he forgot about his glass bottles of fermenting, expanding liquid, and only remembered when three out of four bottles exploded.” Ruth puts her hand to her mouth at the mental image of an unimpressed Alex dripping ginger fizz. “The last bottle had gone off-”

“It was fermented!” Peter objects, but there’s a smile trying to creep in at the edges that makes Ruth think that Alex might be right.

“It made me sick for a week!” And that makes Peter laugh, and Ruth has to stop sewing so that her stitches remain neat and her fingers intact. “And the flat still smelt of ginger when we moved out,” Alex adds, but he might be trying not to laugh now, too.

“It did not,” Peter scoffs. He looks at Ruth and shrugs. “A month, tops.”

“I hate ginger beer, now,” Alex says over their giggling. “And it’s all your fault.”

Peter beams up at her, and it’s an effort to stop her smile from going soft at the corners. It’s easy, with the pair of them, to feel - in orbit, almost. They aren’t insular, not at all, but there’s a weight of shared history between them that Ruth has no in on. No one else does, either, and she’s commiserated before with some of the regular help they have about the solid unit that is Alex-and-Peter. But she’s noticed that they seem to give her _more_ than they give the others; in a chat with Tom, or on Green Valley with Stuart or Chloe, they might have forgotten the story to better bicker over and around everything else. It’s not something they do from rudeness, either; Ruth thinks they really do just forget that some of the things they say make no sense to people who weren’t at that one dig that one summer, or wherever. It’s also very sweet, how well they know each other, even if it was somewhat bewildering to be introduced to a nice young man called Peter and talked to about some bloke called Fonz with no indication that these people might be one and the same. Ruth had been a little worried about it at first; with just the three of them, there’s no way to hide that she’s the odd one out. She’s older, a woman, a historian; her work is indoors and often solitary; she wasn’t there to poke Peter into sweeping up glass or to hold Alex’s hair back as he suffered the after-effects. On Green Valley she’d had Chloe and Stuart to help buffer, but after the initial excitement of signing on here had worn slightly thinner the nerves about being something of a third-wheel for a year had set in.

She needn’t have worried, though. Alex and Peter always tell her their stories and more often than not bring up things that happened when they were all together: in Wales on the farm, in research meetings, in little London coffee shops to do BBC-mandated _team building_ in Alex-and-Peter-mandated cafes that they used to frequent when they were students. And that’s the difference, really. Alex and Peter’s past makes those shops more a part of the pair of them than they are of the three of them, but Ruth had been brought into them and given recommendations and told about the hungover study sessions they used to do there. With Alex at her side and Peter at her feet, she feels pretty damn included.

It’s quiet, but companionable. The fire crackles, the thread draws with a whisper through patterned cotton, and Peter’s breathing becomes more and more measured and slow. Ruth sees his eyelids drooping and nudges a shoulder with her toe. “Better go back inside if you’re sleepy,” she says softly.

“I’m awake,” he says, not very convincingly, but with a smile that forces Ruth to let him stay.

“Soft lad,” she murmurs, feeling heat rise slightly in her cheeks and hoping her too-pale skin isn’t showing it. She busies herself instead with the last few stitches of her mending, holding the result up to the light. Hm. Not bad.

“Ruth, that’s amazing,” Alex says, entirely seriously, and now Ruth’s definitely blushing. At least it’s dark-ish in here. “You can hardly see, look!”

“Have a look in the light before you say that,” Ruth laughs, but Alex will not be deterred. He reaches out, stroking his fingers down the soft cloth and rubbing a thumb over her neat line of tiny stitches. “Well, it’s in one piece, anyway.”

“It’s beautiful,” Alex says. His hand is so much bigger than hers that in just holding the thin necktie with her he’s covering half her hand and she can feel the warmth radiating from them. “I’m very impressed.”

“Let’s see,” Peter says, reaching up to her knees. Alex lets go and Ruth pools the fabric in his wide flat palms. “Very pretty,” he decrees, smiling upside-down at them.

Ruth passes the tie back to Alex, her fingers catching lightly on his palm. Casual touch like this always feels like a _something_ that Ruth is not going to let it become, so she tries hard not to respond to the little tingle of _something_ collected in her fingertips. This is somewhat foiled when Alex chases after and catches her hand in both of his.

“Goodness, Ruth, your hands are freezing!” In the secure hold of Alex’s hands it’s so much warmer than the November night air, and the tiny movements of sewing had entirely failed to maintain much feeling in her fingers, but it’s the _something_ more than the warmth that’s spreading under her skin, into her bloodstream and bones.

“It’s not that bad,” she tries, but Alex gives her a look that rather firmly disagrees with her on that one. “Anyway, I’m a dairymaid - we’re supposed to have cold hands.” Ruth tugs at her hand but Alex just closes on her tighter. It’s not unpleasant - far from it - but it’s not helping with the _something._

Peter reaches up, tapping her lap with palm open and expectant. “Thinking of making much butter this evening?” he says, tone polite and dry and rather difficult to argue with.

Ruth rolls her eyes and gives in to the _something_ that makes her heart, against her better judgement, sing. Peter’s hands are hot, fire-warmed, and rub gently but firmly over hers until they tingle with warmth again. “Thank you,” she says quietly.

“That’s alright,” Peter says easily. “I always wanted to be a glove.”

Ruth feels the huff of Alex’s laugh on her hand in his lap and ducks her head, suddenly a little bit - _overcome_ , to be properly Victorian. She’s terribly fond of these daft lads, who include her equally and make her laugh and hold her hands to warm them up just because it’s a kind thing to do. She wouldn’t enjoy this half so much without them or with anyone else, and she’s rather glad that they’ve intruded on her evening alone to hide away from modernity together.

Ruth sort of loves them, a bit, it would appear.

“That’s why you wanted the glove book, then, I assume?” she says, rather than saying - any of that.

“Yes!” Peter beams. “We’ve come full circle. Would we have managed that if we’d been lying about finding the book?”

“Evidently, yes,” Alex says, trying not to laugh. “Because we were _definitely_ lying about the book.”

“Well don’t tell Ruth that,” Peter says over her laughter. “I don’t want her to have a bad impression of us.”

“It’s far too late for that,” Ruth giggles. She’s seen Alex try to tame a stray cat because it looked a bit moth-eaten, watched Peter yawn through his breakfast because he’d stayed up all night in case the cow needed help giving birth, received baskets of blackberries from the hedgerows because she’d mentioned they might be nice in jam, and they’re both holding her hands because she was a bit chilly. The good ship _Bad Impressions_ sailed long ago.

Alex grins at her like he’s had an idea. “What were your first impressions of us, then?”

“Oh, gosh, that was years ago!” Ruth says, as if the boys hadn’t been fairly memorably charming from the off.

Peter pulls a face. “I don’t want to know. Don’t think I’ve ever made a good first impression in my life.”

Ruth nudges his shoulder gently with her foot. “Can’t be that bad, surely.”

Peter snorts derisively. “He fell asleep two minutes into our first lecture,” Alex says, at least twice as fond as he is amused. How clearly they like each other always makes Ruth smile - it’s an easy, affectionate familiarity born of years of practice. Peter just flops his spare arm over his eyes and groans. “I took notes for him.” Alex digs a toe into Peter’s side to make him move his arm away and swat Alex’s leg.

“I’ve been paying him back for it ever since,” Peter grouses and Ruth grins. “Never lets me forget it.”

“So,” Alex says, leaning over to nudge Ruth’s shoulder with his own. “You’ve heard the worst of it; you’d better tell us what you thought.”

Ruth squares her shoulders, drawing herself upright to think. “Well, I think I thought - Peter was shy, and Alex was nervous,” she says, decidedly. She can remember the day well, when they’d all first met on a February morning so cold and bright it could cut cloth in some backroom of Broadcasting House. There had been all the producers and researchers and whatnot, most of whom she’d already spoken to on the phone, and Stuart, whom she’d met at some symposium or another a few years prior, and a nervous young lady defensively clutching a phone-book’s worth of papers to her chest who would later be introduced to her as Chloe, and-

“I wasn't that nervous!” Alex objects.

“We were _all_ nervous,” Peter corrects. “Except maybe David and Stuart and, of course, the indomitable Ruth.”

“Who was terrified,” she adds. She almost wishes she hadn’t finished her mending so that she could have something to look at that isn’t them, or that they’d at least let go of her hands; it’s a bit intense, suddenly.

“Really?” Alex says, rather softly. “You’d never have known.”

She shrugs, looking at their joined hands collected in her lap. “Well. But Alex-” Alex had been wreathed in sunlight, framed against the window, glowing slightly around the edges. Alex had been talking quickly, hands flying expressively. Alex had been so passionate about the things he was saying. Ruth had stood there, slightly stunned.

Then she’d brushed it off and squared her shoulders and gone to say hello with her hand outstretched and a determined kind of confidence.

“Maybe I just hoped he only talked at seventy miles a minute when he was nervous, rather than all the time,” Ruth says, brushing it off all over again.

Peter laughs triumphantly as Alex nods in concession. “I always thought you were the most competent person in the room - the one I had to impress, you know,” Alex says, and Ruth tilts her head in confusion, blushes. She can feel her cheeks heating, and it’s too much to hope that they won’t notice. Alex shrugs. “You just seemed to know what we were supposed to be doing.”

“That’s true,” Peter adds. His spare arm is back to leaning idly on Alex’s legs, prodding and tapping at his knee in some rhythm. “You were very nice about how late I was, too.”

“You weren’t that late,” Ruth says placatingly.

He had been, actually. Ruth had gone to the table by the door to escape the endless telly-talk and get some tea, and a rather scruffy student-looking type had stuck a terrified head around the door, breathing hard like he’d been running. “Am I very late?” he’d blurted out, all in a rush.

Ruth had felt so sorry for him that she’d checked her watch and rounded down from ten minutes to “Only half a minute. We haven’t started yet; have this tea. I’m Ruth.”

“Peter,” he’d said, gulping at her hot tea and sticking his hand out almost as an afterthought. His charm was effortless and entirely unconscious, and Ruth’s almost grateful that he’d been annoyingly late, or she’d have fallen for him then and there. She’s almost grateful, too, that she’d been too caught up in nerves to fall for Alex. Falling for them slowly, after all, has been so much more fun/sweet/painful/rewarding.

“I was _very_ late,” Peter says. “You were very generous, but Alex was not. He told me the truth.”

“I’d been waxing lyrical about how reliable you were, Peter,” Alex says. “Our whole TV career, such as it was, was flashing before my eyes.”

“I just thought you looked scared witless, and then all shy, hiding behind Alex’s skirts,” Ruth says, fondness overflowing and bleeding into her voice. Peter huffs a laugh, closing his eyes, and Alex grins. “But you brought me tea a few times, so you’ve won my allegiance forever.”

“What a boon indeed,” Peter yawns sleepily, “to win the protection of a fae lady in exchange for two mugs of tea.”

Ruth raises an eyebrow. “A _fae lady_?” Alex queries, smiling softly.

Peter grunts, the flicker of a frown rushing across his face, eyes still closed. “Well, Ruth said _we_ were faeries - why shouldn’t she be, too. And anyway, faeries keep hopping in and out of time, like we do. Harp and carp, and all that.” The tips of his ears flush lightly, the only outward sign that he might have preferred not to have said any of that out loud.

Ruth smiles down at him, fonder than she can or will express, and shrugs. “I’ll take it,” she says softly.

Alex prods their prone companion with his toe, not unkindly. “Beddie-byes for Peter, methinks.” Peter groans and rolls over, wrapping his spare arm around Alex’s shins and tucking his face into Ruth’s ankle so that his wild curls tickle her leg. His other arm is now oddly contorted back to hold Ruth’s hand, so she transfers their joined hands from her lap to Alex’s knee instead. She could have, should have, let go, but. She’s never professed to be much good at self denial, only to be doing more-or-less her best, and the warmth of their skin is irresistible; work-worn callouses pressing into her skin with deliberate gentleness. These hands that are so careful with her own have wrestled sheep and hauled stone and practically rebuilt this cottage - _for her,_ Ruth’s mind wants to add - but they press warmth into her fingers with care enough that she could be made of fine china.

And it’s nice, sometimes, to feel like they’re as halfway in love with her as she is with them.

That’s the thing, really, she thinks as Peter grunts appreciatively at the movement and settles more comfortably at their feet. Ruth’s always been - aware - of the handsome young men wandering about the farm in various states of period dress but in a more abstract sense, as if Stuart and Chloe had acted as some kind of buffer to that line of thought. Chloe, particularly - Ruth had half-supposed, once or twice, that she might end up dating one or other of the boys, what with their getting on so well and being of an age to do so. It had, therefore, been different when the girls had stood about in the sun, watching the shirtless sheep-washers and being loudly and not-entirely-jokingly appreciative. It had been funny to watch the hot red blush seep down from Alex’s crimson face and across his pale shoulders as he resolutely tried to ignore them, easy to laugh at Peter’s occasional joking bodybuilder pose, but now - now Ruth’s half-afraid to think about it, in case her thoughts slide towards how far across Alex’s skin a blush can spread, or if Peter will show off for them privately. It feels like Ruth’s teetering on a precipice, or back balancing between two puddles in the yard, and she’s not sure if there’s a forward or a back to go to. The only thing worse than telling them, risking her job and her happiness and their friendship, would be to get over it. Ruth would take the sweet unrest any day over not seeing them.

Alex makes an odd short noise, blink-and-miss-it, and a slight tension settles in his leg where Ruth and Peter’s hands rest together. It’s the tiniest little thing, but Ruth can’t seem to help attuning herself to his gestures. He’s uncomfortable, and it started when she put her hand on his knee, and so-

Ruth stands, careful to avoid Peter on the floor, and tugs her hands gently free from Alex and Peter’s grip. There’s the slightest reluctance from both of them, and Ruth’s hands object immediately to the contrasting cold, but. They let her go. “Come along with me, then,” she says, reaching desperately for some kind of cheer within herself. “Don’t sleep on the floor, Peter.”

Peter mumbles something that might have been “Don’t tell me what to do,” but for the extensive yawning, and stretches like a cat before sitting up and blinking blearily into the gloom.

Alex stands and leans in, past Ruth, to blow the candle out and she can feel the warmth radiating from him. She can’t tell him, would hate to make him uncomfortable again; he’s near enough to touch, but might as well be a thousand miles away. Ruth closes her eyes against a sudden rush of disappointment, and when she opens them Alex is near-far still, looking worriedly at her.

She manages a smile. “Bracing myself for the cold,” she lies, instead of _I love you and I think that makes you unhappy_ , and his face clears into a smile of understanding. There’s an unreality in this room, in the gloomy glow of the fire’s embers and the bleak cold night without, and Ruth so desperately wants to gather Peter and Alex to her and hold them tight, as if what she does here won’t affect real life.

But Peter yawns again, loudly, as he heaves himself upright, and Ruth pushes that away and smiles brightly for them both. Peter offers her a sleepy grin back and it takes every ounce of self-control that she has to stay without of arm’s reach, to not step naturally into the warmth of that smile and see how much of it she can taste.

“Bedtime,” Alex says softly, ushering Ruth and Peter before him back downstairs into the dark and the cold. “Big day tomorrow.”

“Mother? Is that you?” Peter says, so dryly that he startles a laugh out of Ruth. “Honestly, Alex.”

“Sorry for _caring_ about your _sleep schedule_ ,” Alex says, pretending to be wounded entirely unconvincingly. Ruth grins at the door as she locks up behind them, and traces of her smile must still be on her face when she turns back to the boys behind her, because Alex smiles like he might be a little bit relieved. Ruth promises herself to not let this _something_ show, anymore, if she’s making them unhappy.

“Ah, whatever,” Peter says, waving a hand and leaning back to stare at the sky, spreading his arms like he can hold the whole carpet of night within his arms. “Look at the stars, though!”

Ruth steps up to stand between them, leeching warmth from the inches separating their skin, and tilts her head back to look up at the heavens. “It’s beautiful,” Alex breathes beside her, and she can’t help but smile at his delight.

“It’s really not bad,” she agrees, grin only broadening when Peter tuts gently over her extreme lack of romance, arms flopping back to his sides. “But it’s also pretty bleedin’ cold, chaps, so can we get in?”

“No appreciation,” Peter chides, but he does also tuck her hand into his elbow, pulling her tight against his side. She can’t help but burrow slightly into the warmth, but Peter only puts his warm hand over her already-cold one.

Ruth feels a nudge on her other side and turns to see Alex’s elbow extended, too. She looks at his face in confusion but he won’t meet her eyes. “I can see what you meant, earlier, about the fae. It’s certainly pretty magical out here.”

Ruth gives up on ever trying to understand Alex, men, and the human race as a whole, and accepts his arm so that she’s wedged into the warmth between them. They start, as one, to meander across the yard, in a cross between lovers promenading and a three-legged race, all sacred and profane and stumbling. The _something_ rolls into a tight coil and lodges in her belly, heavy and hard and feeding on the mingled crushing joy and swooping sadness of just being with these men who love her a little, but not enough.

Peter presses clumsily tighter into her side and she trips into Alex even further. He only just manages to steady them and prevent their tumble onto the icy ground. “Careful, Fonz,” he says laughingly, and Ruth gets that little twinge of odd-one-out again.

“Sorry,” Peter says, not very apologetically, and continues snuggling into Ruth’s side, pressing the twinge away.

“Are you, though?” Alex asks at the same time as Ruth says “No, you’re not.” Peter grins delightedly at them, but Ruth is too busy basking in the warmth of his smile to puzzle out why he’s so happy, exactly.

“I’ll never understand you,” Alex says, sounding oddly pleased about the prospect, and Ruth wonders if a sudden inability to use one’s mental faculties is a standard response to Peter’s grin.

And Ruth’s not sure she’ll ever understand Alex and Peter either, but. Tucked between them in the still of the freezing night in the warmth they share with her, as they bicker with fondness and familiarity over her head, she thinks she might enjoy trying. For as long as they’ll let her, she decides, as Peter on one side and Alex on the other alter their grips on her arms to lift and swing her, laughing, right over the puddles between which she no longer needs to balance.


End file.
